William D. Drake

Briny Hooves

Tracklisting

Wolves

Dark Ecstasies

Ugly Fortress

Serendipity Doodah

Fountains Smoke

The Seashell Song

Sweet Peace

Requiem for a Snail

Sea Horse

Melancholy World

January Night

Press Release

Briny Hooves is the second solo album by composer, songwriter and one time Cardiacs key man William D Drake. Complex and passionate, Drake's work draws upon psychedelia, madrigals, Jacobean poetry and sea shanties, making him a worthy successor to the line of great English eccentrics. However, while clearly rooted in the same soil as Syd Barrett, Peter Hammill and (distant cousin) Nick Drake, his contemporary counterparts are the American alt heavyweights: Sufjan Stevens, Jon Brion and Mr E. With them he shares the capacity to make seemingly impossible connections. Weaving disparate threads with a sense of playfulness and chordal lushness akin to that of Brian Wilson, his music has a historical span matched only by Dead Can Dance.

More accessible than its predecessor, but no less characteristic or daring, Briny Hooves is a trove of strange delights - hearty and effervescent, melancholic and dreamlike. Never far from the salty grind of his signature harmonium, its songs span the perfect psyche pop of 'Serendipity Doodah', the Wilson-esque lilt of 'Ugly Fortress' and 'Melancholy World' and the haunting prog lament of 'January Night'. Lyrically enigmatic and Mellotron-ically epic, 'Seahorse' is Briny Hooves at its most seductive, its wordless trumpet-led refrain etched into the memory from first listen.

In Briny Hooves, the inimical Mr Drake has served us not just a rich feast for the senses. This product of his highly individual vision is the rarest of beasts, an album as playful as it is passionate and urgent as it is timeless.